My Sister, the Serial Killer

The knife Ayoola has taken from her dead father, which she uses to kill, symbolizes her inherent connection with her deceased parent. Father was an abusive tyrant, and he and Ayoola both share psychopathic and sociopathic traits. As her father once worshipped the knife and bragged about it in a ritualistic display of power and dominance, so now Ayoola uses it to establish her power over men whom she perceives as abusers. Ironically, Ayoola professes that the knife offers her a link to her father, yet she kills men precisely because they remind her of her father.

To avoid absorbing her sister’s sadistic nature, Korede gives the knife a sentience that it doesn’t possess: “For some reason, I cannot imagine her resorting to stabbing if that particular knife were not in her hand; almost as if it were the knife and not her that was doing the killing” (35). By perceiving the knife as having a will of its own, Korede can blame her father’s spirit, and even the knife itself, for Ayoola’s crimes. She doesn’t have to face who her sister truly is.

Even on a linguistic level, Muhtar’s role in the novel is symbolic: He is not just Korede’s comatose patient; he is patient and listens to his caretaker. After he wakes up, he shows kindness and support to Korede, someone he probably wouldn’t have befriended under other circumstances.

The patient as a general symbol represents someone who is under care, who accepts the order by which he or she must receive help from others. The meaning of the symbol might have its positive slant (the patient as a helpful and thankful individual) and its negative aspects (the patient as a nightmarish figure of resistance and stubborn refusal to cooperate). Muhtar combines both the positive and negative characteristics of the patient: He is grateful to Korede for keeping him company and for sharing her secrets with him, yet in his newly awoken state, he is indifferent to things he used to tolerate, including his family and other nursing staff (except the cleaner, Mohammed, with whom he shares a language and heritage). He symbolizes the listener, the confessor, and the advisor, but he is also an avenger and corrector of wrongs.  

Ayoola’s four victims (Somto, Peter, Femi, and Gboyega) represent both a symbol and one of the novel’s main motifs. They jointly symbolize her pathological dominance over men and her revenge against her father’s abuse. For Korede, who has helped Ayoola hide her crimes and who now continually invites the dead men back into her thoughts as reminders of her sister’s illness, the men become significant motifs.

Somto and Peter embody the idea of justified murder as Korede persuades herself they were abusive and the first to attack. Gboyega represents the motif of the sponsor, the cheater, but also the fool (maga, as Korede calls both herself and him) who deserves to die for being a fool. Femi is the only victim that Korede never met, yet he becomes a recurring motif; in Korede’s mind, he did not possess the same characteristics as other men did, and should not have met the end that they did. He appears as a shadowy figure on the bottom of the lagoon, bloated food for the fish, a terrifying reminder of Ayoola’s crimes and of Korede’s complicity. He also symbolizes the waking of Korede’s moral dilemma and her troubled conscience.